For our February presentation, Justin Edwards, the Founder and CEO of Iterative Consulting, will be giving us an overview of using Elastic Beanstalk (EB) to deploy Rails applications to AWS. EB is a service from Amazon that simplifies many aspects of the cloud deployment process. After some initial setup, deploying your application becomes as simple as pushing up code to a branch. EB will get to work orchestrating Amazon’s alphabet soup of services to deliver an appropriate cloud infrastructure that automatically scales up and down with your needs, leaving the developer free to focus on writing code. Of course, that initial setup can still be a bit of a challenge! That’s why Justin has developed an open-source Rails Elastic Beanstalk Starter App to help you get started.

In this presentation, Justin will discuss the lessons learned in developing the Starter App, the benefits and drawbacks of scalable cloud deployments, and additional application considerations. We will also walk through a soup-to-nuts Rails cloud deployment together. This presentation should be informative for both new and experienced Rails developers alike, and no prior experience with cloud deployments or AWS is necessary.

Pizza and other refreshments will be provided.